[passivate]

You're absolutely right, it is extremely hard to emulate the programming experience via such games. If you break down the skills you need in most (with obvious caveats) programming related jobs - reading others' code, explaining your code to others, designing, documenting, brainstorming, breaking down problems, etc, etc, it is difficult to train for those. In the abstract, it makes sense to practice those skills since for many programmers there isn't anything exciting happening day-to-day, and there is a lot of grunt work maintaining existing code bases.

In most physical fields (athletics being an easy example) there is an amazing amount of carry-over from training into performance. Training being where you build up skills and performance being when you apply said learned skill to the performance. But in more abstract and cognition-heavy fields its muddy and vague.